Miles O’Brien out at CNN…

TVNewser scoops that Miles O’Brien will be leaving CNN. Read between the lines and this looks very involuntary…

O’Brien’s departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O’Brien as well as six producers. O’Brien has been CNN’s chief technology and environment correspondent since being replaced as anchor of American Morning in April 2007.

This is a bad call. The response TVN gets from CNN on this spins the story as the bulk of their environmental stuff is being covered under the Planet in Peril/AC360 umbrella. Well what about Space? What about Science? Who handles that? Who gives it the prominence that it deserves? Hell, NBC has managed to keep Jay Barbree around all these years. Is CNN admitting it can’t do something NBC can?

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23 Responses to “Miles O’Brien out at CNN…”

As long as they’ve got the “Planet in Peril” propoganda department to manufacture stories about the earth getting warmer, they don’t need to cover actual science….like the fact that the earth has actually gotten COOLER over the past few years.

I live in the Midwest. We got hit by 4 more inches of snow this morning, on top of the 4 we got Sunday. It’s 15 degrees outside and November was brutal. Global warming my a$$!

The US media has been practicing a blackout on the debate about Climate Change. However the international press is actually having a field day with it. (Pro and Con)
For those of you who are unaware of ½ of this great debate please paste this “Beware the church of climate alarm” in your search engine and it will take you to a great article in the Sydney Morning Herald. Whether you agree or not, Czech President, Vaclav Klaus makes some points you won’t hear on Cable or in your newspaper. I wonder why? Political correctness run amuck!

And BR and lyons, we can thank the Lord above for the fact that Algore often speaks on global warming on the very coldest days of the year!

But back to O’Brien – isn’t it sad that these cable outlets CONTINUE to focus on stupid celebrity news? Most of these Hollywood types are idiots to begin with, but the only thing worse is the people who follow and report on their every move!

Agreeing that global warming is still debateable in some circles is not the same as agreeing it’s a media-fabricated hoax. The chances that we can dump tons of crap into the atmosphere for over a hundred years and not expect some consequences for it are infintestimal.

The media caved and got suckered into “climate change.” That phrase is a well-rehearsed tool of the warming debunkers. They won that one.

Miles is a good anchor and reporter. They’re stupid to cut him free. But hey, it’s CNN we’re talking about.

The chances that we can dump tons of crap into the atmosphere for over a hundred years and not expect some consequences for it are infintestimal.

Heh…no kidding. I wish the anti-global warming theorists would realize that this isn’t so much about global warming, which is debatable if for no other reason than because global warming can only truly be measured over hundreds of years and not decades, as it is about global pollution. We can disagree about the “conclusions” but we shouldn’t be disagreeing to the point that we forget the issues that brought this up in the first place…pollution and what it’s doing to our planet.

notfoxy, you crack me up. So now it’s the “global warming debunkers” who forced the Gore-lemmings to adapt their pet phrase to “climate change”? Here’s a better theory. The TRUTH is forcing them to quit yapping about “global warming”.

Look, we all agree we need to take better care of our environment. But the alarmist crap has gotten ridiculous. Al Gore is making a fortune spreading his outright propoganda.

Here’s the perfect fit to all this nonsense….the United Nation’s climate change conference is going to leave a ridiculously large carbon footprint.

Moose farts send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than my SUV does in an entire year.

The polar bears are not becoming extinct. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s melting has nothing to do with global warming. New York City will not be under water do to the ice caps melting. And if it ever does happen, don’t blame me. Blame the moose.

Problem is you’ll never know if Global Warming is to blame until it’s too late to do anything about it. Some people don’t want to play Russian Roulette and want to stop it now. Others have other priorities. Woe is us if they end up being wrong.

“Problem is you’ll never know if Global Warming is to blame until it’s too late to do anything about it. Some people don’t want to play Russian Roulette and want to stop it now. Others have other priorities. Woe is us if they end up being wrong”.

That’s pure emotion, not science even logical speculation.

We are all for clean water and clean air but carbon is a natural element. Carbon levels have varried throughout history and we can look back thousands of years and measure it along side warming and cooling. Hint, there is no demostrated proven cause and effect.

Problem is you’ll never know if Global Warming is to blame until it’s too late to do anything about it. Some people don’t want to play Russian Roulette and want to stop it now. Others have other priorities. Woe is us if they end up being wrong.

Exactly. FWIW, people started saying ‘global climate change’ vice ‘global warming’ to counter exactly the kind of arguments we are hearing here – ‘how can there be global warming if I personally experienced a colder than normal winter?’ Simple – global warming refers to the MEAN temperature of the earth. Which is undeniably going up. And that means weather extremes – hotter hots and colder colds and more violent storms, etc.

I simply can’t understand the anti-warming crowd – not so much their arguments as their vehemence. Why so hostile to the possibility? Here’s a thought experiment – imagine you are on one side of the argument and you are wrong.

For instance – say you believe global warming is real and is a serious threat to our survival, and you have the power to act on your beliefs. And then you’re wrong. Consequence? You spent a lot of money you didn’t need to spend quite as fast as you spent it, and the earth is cleaner and we are no longer dependent on non-renewable energy sources. Oh, the horror!

Then take the reverse – you believe global warming is a hoax, and you’re in charge of the planet so you don’t do a thing different from what you’re doing now. Companies continue to pollute and plunder the planet for short-term gain. The ice caps melt, the sea levels rise, arable land shrinks as encroaching seas and deserts take over farm lands, food becomes scarce and water wars become common. Famine in the third world wipes out whole populations, and the so-called great powers go to war over the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels (we left it too late to switch to renewables, remember?). Massive die-off – it’s not a given that the human race will become extinct, but it’s not impossible, either. It’s not a given that human civilization will become a thing of the past as we all (those of us strong enough to survive) dwindle to a few bands of hunter-gatherers, possibly not enough population to sustain a technological society, which requires pretty advance agriculture and a highly educated population. Kind of hard to maintain the kind of society we enjoy today when it takes all day every day to get enough food to survive the winter.

So on the one hand, the consequences of being wrong are some overeager expenditures and a cleaner planet. On the other hand, billions and billions of deaths and possibly the end of the human race. I’d rather risk spending more money now on the offchance, myself.

Actually what will happen is probably going to be somewhere in between. After a few more island-nations disappear and the arctic shelf collapses entirely and a few more millions die in famines in countries we don’t care about because the people aren’t white enough, we’ll finally get serious and start doing something. At which point it’s going to make the current financial bailout look like gumball machine money.

Art, thanks for your post, I will try to (sorry for the length) address some of your questions. Let’s stipulate that the vast majority of folks on both sides are for common sense environmental protection policies that keep our water land and air clean. Let’s remove the carcinogens from the environment, but why all of a sudden (based on unproven mathematical theories) do we focus only on a natural occurring element like CO2 that just until recently was considered as natural as H2O.
Your question, “I simply can’t understand the anti-warming crowd – not so much their arguments as their vehemence. Why so hostile to the possibility? Here’s a thought experiment – imagine you are on one side of the argument and you are wrong.”
Here is why your logic is faulty. We are not talking here about taking some trivial ‘better safe than sorry’ actions here. Your advocating World Wide changes (higher prices and regulations ) that will effect everything you buy and do and they don’t make economic sense. They will lower the standard living, eliminate choices, institute burdensome regulations, limit freedom, increase poverty for billions of people. All the pratical proven climate change prevention plans work by making low cost energy more expensive and thereby reducing demand. If Joe six-pack can’t afford his eclectic bill or fill his car up with gas anymore he is poorer than he would have been under your “better safe than sorry” plan. If the third world is not allowed to develop then billions of people stay in poverty. If economic growth is cannot occur by definition poverty increases especially in poorer areas. Regulations that add cost by definition reduce activity and GDP. That’s a fact. Inventions that reduce cost lift people out of poverty.
Now, all of us are all for alternative energy, cleaner fuels and robust R&D to invent competitive substitutes to the existing energy. The just have to make economic sense and be completive with low cost carbon based fuels to avoid the unintended consequences of shrinking GDP and increasing poverty. Should we really increase poverty simply based on a ‘better safe than sorry” policy. That type of thinking could shut any activity down. You can probably apply that logic to all types of human activity.
I’m sure the climate is changing; it always has and always will and let’s continue the research and open up the debate more. Let’s also not forget that we may not be able to change a natural climate evolution because it may be beyond our control but we can adapt to change. Trillions $$ may be spent on this. It may be better spent on human adaption programs that meet projected needs as they arise.
Finally, we have all read the pro climate change arguments. I recommend some of the PHD work that questions some of these theories. You may find it at least interesting and informative. Suggestion From the Financial Times Limited 2008 please paste “A foolish overreaction to climate change” in your search engine. Would love to see cable news hosts some debates instead of advocacy programs on the subject.

It’s the same tired Reagan-era argument: More regulation hurts business. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, the era of anti-regulation is over. A libertarian, no-regulation approach to an industrialized planet is not workable. Freedom of choice creates the skies you see over China. The kind that needed CGI fireworks super-imposed over the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games because the real ones were lost in the smog.

but why all of a sudden (based on unproven mathematical theories) do we focus only on a natural occurring element like CO2 that just until recently was considered as natural as H2O.

Oh, come on. Of course CO2 is a naturally occurring element. So is nitrogen. Yet if you changed the percentage of nitrogen in the atmosphere by a few percent, everyone and everything alive on the planet would die. Just because something occurs in nature (and pretty much everything occurs in nature) doesn’t mean it’s safe in the atmosphere.

And we DO know what happens to an atmosphere when you add too much CO2 to it – this isn’t unproven theory. You can simulate any atmosphere you want in laboratories. Carbon monoxide (CO – also naturally occuring) kills people not because it’s toxic, but because it’s not oxygen – people suffocate.

All the pratical proven climate change prevention plans work by making low cost energy more expensive and thereby reducing demand.

Also untrue. Current energy costs are heavily subsidized by governments. Solar, wind and hydroelectric power is cheaper once infrastructure is in place than coal-powered plants, but it’s existing capabilities that have the riches to afford the lobbyists to keep their industries’ costs lower.

And WRT poverty, the tradeoff is shortly going to become (if it isn’t already) energy versus food. All the low-cost energy in the world isn’t going to help people who can’t afford to eat.

Belgium: Climate scientist Luc Debontridder of the Belgium Weather Institute’s Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) co-authored a study in August 2007 which dismissed a decisive role of CO2 in global warming: “CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. “Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore’s movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it.”

Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: “It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.”

John Coleman, weatherman for KUSI in San Diego (started the weather channel)
Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.
All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.
Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.
Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t.

CNN’s Miles O’Brien (July 23, 2007): The scientific debate is over.” “We’re done.” O’Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming “are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually.”

Now how could Miles O’Brein dismiss thousands of experts who don’t agree. That is shoddy biased reporting that should of disqualified him from his job. Political correctnes is a real danger to our society.

“All the low-cost energy in the world isn’t going to help people who can’t afford to eat” Quite the contrary. low cost energy produces more and cheaper food. Basic economics 101.

NF
I’m for regulated free market capitalism. The regulations must be well thought out and not just kneejerk reactions. For example the regulations Barney Frank & Chris Dodd imposed on Fannie and Freddie (although well meaning) started the subprime fiasco and the fix we are currently in now. In an effort to expand home ownership to the poor he had these agencies underwrite or buy ‘no doc” mortgages that no sane bank had ever before written on their own. Guess what. They all defaulted. Fannie and Freddie sold these off in securities with AAA ratings that were never real world. On the other hand, antitrust regulations that promote competition are essential to preventing monopolies and benefit us all. Regulations again known pollutants like sulfur emissions make sense. Remember, the people have no vote in China, That’s the Communist party calling the shots over there and they don’t seem to care about common sense pollution control. Too bad an election over there couldn’t change things. Maybe Obama can talk some sense into those Commies. Maybe he can snap their cookies!

how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t.

This is simple ignorance or denial. Tiny trace elements of lead in your bloodstream will certainly kill you. One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is to say ‘look how big the earth is – how can widdle ol’ mankind possibly destabilize it?’ But if you look at the earth at night from space, it’s pretty clear that mankind can have a significant impact on the planet.

low cost energy produces more and cheaper food. Basic economics 101.

You can’t turn energy directly into food. You have to have arable land to grow plants or raise livestock. Cheaper energy is coming at the expense of arable land. A warmer planet increases deserts and raises sea levels – it’s already happening.

There are other more direct effects – take the corn ethanol travesty. There are a lot of things you can make alcohol out of that people can’t eat – waste wood, for example. yet the government is subsidizing the conversion of corn from a food crop to an energy crop, with predictable results. Enormous amounts of corn are being diverted from the food chain to the energy industry, causing worldwide spikes in prices of other grains. THAT is Economy 101, simple supply and demand. Less corn means a greater need for, and higher prices for, other grains such as rice. With the result that many countries are seeing their staple food source double and triple in price. And it’s not the free market that is setting the price for corn, it’s the government subsidies.

For example the regulations Barney Frank & Chris Dodd imposed on Fannie and Freddie (although well meaning) started the subprime fiasco and the fix we are currently in now.

It wasn’t Fannie and Freddie that sparked the subprime mortgage mess – it was emerging economies’ appetites for mortgage-backed securities. The newly-rich in the emerging economies in Asia wanted to invest their new-found wealth in commodities that ‘always’ go up, and what better than the US housing market? Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough mortgage-backed securities to feed the appetite, so banks and mortgage brokers created more by taking advantage of lax regulations to start selling mortgages to anyone with a pulse. Once again, simple supply and demand. They based their risk models on traditional mortgages, wherein the buyer actually had to prove he/she could afford to repay the loan. It wasn’t good intentions, it was greed that created the mortgage meltdown.

“This is simple ignorance or denial. Tiny trace elements of lead in your bloodstream will certainly kill you.”
That simply is pulling something out of the air! You and your colleagues have the burden of proof (not me) to prove that these tiny elements of change CO2 to the atmosphere are harmful and you have not done so. Theory is not proof and no lab experiment has proven your theory. If so site the study?
Low cost energy produces more and cheaper food. Basic economics 101.
“You can’t turn energy directly into food. You have to have arable land to grow plants or raise livestock. Cheaper energy is coming at the expense of arable land. A warmer planet increases deserts and raises sea levels – it’s already happening”.
Low cost energy makes farming more profitable and profitability always increases production and supply. Lower production costs, increased supply lowers prices. Lower prices make food affordable to the people with lower incomes. (The wonders of capitalism and free enterprise at work.) No proof is offered that energy consumption is causing more deserts. (I’m not advocating this but what about the benefits of a warmer climate, they could be considerable if we adapt to it?) IMO, we can’t stop the evolution of the planet but we can make it work for us.

“A warmer planet increases deserts and raises sea levels”. Yes possibly, but this may be natural and beyond our control. There once was a theory that “‘bleeding the patient” would cure the disease. It was a blind un proven faith that was considered science. Here we go again, prove your theory then we can take drastic costly action or adapt. At this point taking action you recommend has no rational proof of being any kind of solution but is a sure is cost to world prosperity. This is why the Global warming controversy is more like a religion than a science. Blind faith without proof. Give us proof (not a wild guess) that all this is manmade and you win. I will jump on the train too.